Betting on Darwin

Doc: You've been trying to
establish an object model built around IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB
Protocol) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture),
versus Microsoft's DCOM (Distributed Common Object Model). Does
this Open Source release play in that at all?

Tom: It's going to have an
ORB; I can't tell you exactly when. I don't think the world is
going to tolerate a vacuum in this space for very long. I've seen a
few proposals. All the existing popular options have some kind of
fatal flaw in the eyes of part of the community. The DCOM guys have
a problem with this part of an ORB. And this CORBA group has a
fundamental problem with the portability or interoperability of
some part of DCOM. There are just wave after wave of these
concerns. We've had arguments within Netscape about the best way to
address the question. I'm looking for Darwin taking over on this
one, too. I think it might be a spirited debate, and educational
for me. I am not an objects guy.

Doc: I was talking to Phil
Hughes about this and he said the same thing. But he added that it
all depends on your generation—when you grew up.

Tom: It's true.

Doc: He said, if you go to
the schools now, everybody's talking objects. Maybe not so for the
older guys.

Tom: Some of those older
guys have evolved into objects people. Their arguments are very
interesting. I follow them, but I can't generate them. In any case,
I think it's going to be interesting to get this out in the
open.

Marc: I bet we'll have
native IIOP built into Mozilla in source code form within a year.
From somewhere.

Doc: Meanwhile, there seems
to be faith that the world is going to be made of objects, and
there will be an enormous conversation in objects between clients
and servers all over the world. I don't know to what extent
evolution toward that state is constrained by the presence of two
rival object models.

Marc: As an issue, it's not
pragmatically useful or important to enough people yet. The results
may be what you describe, but the object people get confused
between the way the world's going to look in N years versus what
it's actually going to take for interest to pick up and carry us
there. This is why it was so hard to time the adoption of LANs. In
retrospect, it took time for all this technology to connect before
it made more sense to print over the LAN as opposed to carrying
floppy disks. To get to the current state of the Internet, we had
to get technology to a point where folks wanted e-mail accounts in
order to write to their kids in college. I think this applies to
programmers too. What's the trip-over point where all of a sudden
it really matters? Personally, I think it's going to happen when
people build more sophisticated multi-tier applications. Then
they're going to need smarter communication between clients and
servers than they're able to get today. And they're already going
to be developing a lot of their logic on the server in the form of
objects because they're using C++ or Java, and also off the client.
And so, they're just naturally going to start to interconnect those
two.

Doc: Directory service is
going to play in a really huge way here. You've got a directory
server.

Marc: A damn good
one.

Doc: That seems to be
optimized for this. Would you tweak it to match what's going on in
the outside world? Let's say you put the ORB in the browser, watch
what happens, see who's trafficking in objects, how it looks and
who needs a directory.

Marc: Absolutely. A lot of
what we do in the servers will be influenced by what happens with
Mozilla. It's sort of always been that way. Fundamentally, there's
a chicken and egg problem with some of these things that involve
all kinds of servers, and it usually requires you to get some
amount of user action or adoption going on before lots of stuff
starts to happen on the server. I'll bet that's exactly what's
going to happen in this case.

The Hot Dog Stand

Doc: I like your faith. But
your critics have said “It's a desperate move, and they didn't
have any other choice.”

Tom: That's driving me
crazy. Any business decision is going to look vague when the costs
and risks versus the opportunities and benefits are highly
balanced. The teeter-totter teeters. In this case, the cost of
releasing the source to the Navigator plummeted in the last nine
months or so. Now, it's a no-brainer—time to pursue a new
opportunity.

Marc: The flip-over point
was when we made the binaries free. After that, releasing the
source made perfect sense.

Tom: The benefits and
opportunities have always been strong. It's just that the costs
have been high. Well, they have not always been strong. I have to
be fair. In 1994, there weren't many developers out there who
“got” the Web—whose heads operated in that space. And if you
invited everybody to come and play, the signal-to-noise ratio would
have been zero. Since then everybody has come to know about the
Web, and they have attitude and interest and ideas, so for some
time the opportunities and benefits have been on the strong side.
But when the costs plummeted, then suddenly it was a lot easier
decision to make, regardless.

Marc: Those statements
usually come from people who are typically not involved in
businesses. Or at least not businesses of scope. There's a natural
decision-making process businesses go through to try to maximize
their economic opportunity.

Doc: I liked the way Jim
Barksdale put it when he said, “We had to get revenues low enough,
so we could make this choice.”

Marc: Right! We had to walk
it all the way down to zero. Along the way, we used that revenue to
subsidize all these other products and services that now generate
revenue.

Doc: Change goes on all the
time anyway. All products have a life. Either they change
completely in order to live, or they die.

Marc: Yep.

Doc: That's true of Windows,
of browsers, of all kinds of things.

Marc: Which is why it's
ridiculous to criticize a company for changing.

Tom: The criticism is, we're
in power and we have competitors, so we've got to be desperate to
give all this power to our competitors.

Marc: To some people it's
“Aw, they're desperate.” And it's obvious they haven't even
thought it through any more than that. It's a pointless comment.
Jim Barksdale abbreviates this to “They haven't ever run a hot dog
stand. What do they know?”

Doc: The problem with the
press is that when you're running a sportscast, you have to fill
the air with sounds of competition even when there's nothing going
on.

Tom: You're really right
about them using war terminology, using that chest of war words,
and when things don't fit that model, the brains break. The
stunning thing is their unwillingness to put that box away and
break out a new box.

Marc: It's especially
interesting when you think about it, because there are so many
different sources of media now—so many different voices out there,
striving for unique coverage and unique angles. You've got an
inherent unwillingness by a large number of them to actually do
anything unique.

Doc: Part of it is time
pressure: you have to say something. Another is the story
principle. Stories are the fundamental unit of consciousness.
Conflict is interesting, and most stories are about conflict. No
story starts with “And they lived happily ever after.” What keeps
them turning pages is the conflict that's going on, and it will
still be going on after they turn the page. That is inherently
interesting to human beings. The Great Harmony is not interesting.
A bunch of people hacking on something for the pure fun of it and
for peer review is not as interesting to the press as the “Great
Browser War”.

Doc: There is also a peerage
among the Dilberts of the world that is invisible to those further
up the corporate hierarchy.

Marc: That's true.

Doc: So there is all this
interesting stuff going on, but it doesn't involve conflict so it
isn't that interesting to the press.

Marc: Now there are more
people in the technologist community than there ever have been.
More people are comfortable with technology now at every level than
there were five to ten years ago—just a huge number more.

Doc: Anything else you want
to add before we wrap this up?

Marc: I think over the next
six months we'll have an explosion of activity. What pops out of
this new system will be interesting. You can view it as an
amazingly complex system or organism or computational device on a
large scale, with its own set of rules and organizing principles.
Stuff is bound to pop out. By definition, what pops out will be the
right set of stuff. It will be self-fulfilling.

Doc:
This brings to mind John Seemly Brown's matrix, where he puts
social computing in context. He says there are some things that
only we know. They emerge in the social space, rather than the
personal. And most of the shared knowledge is tacit rather than
explicit. Tapping into this tacit dimension is what you have in
mind, I think.

Marc: Absolutely.

Tom: Domestically, among the
people here at Netscape, I've been explicit, saying, “Look, I'm
not going to explain to the Open Source world how open source
works. Build it; they will come.” If they need to be sold, they're
too much work for me anyway. As long as I believe there is a large
community out there—that will come, based on tacit
communication—I'm in business. And the rest of the people can
learn how this thing works. For some people, however, I have to be
clear: “I'm expecting this behavior.” This allowed Mozilla to
say, “We're just kind of doing this,” and expect Open Source
behavior to run with it. Yeah, absolutely. At the tacit level, the
Open Source people totally get what's going on.

Doc: In a way, you're saying
“We have built it, now they'll come and rebuild it.”

Tom: Oh yeah. We build the
place where source lives, and give them an opportunity to get in
there and get their fingers dirty, and no one will be able to keep
them away.

Doc: Like a free Home Depot
for developers.

Tom: Yeah!

Marc: Right. We've got a few
things we think we can stock it with on top of Mozilla. I'd like to
see what the community does with Electrical Fire.

Tom: The list of things like
Electrical Fire is about seven, eight, nine, ten items long, all of
which are majorly interesting. So, we've got some stuff. We can set
some fires.

Doc Searls
(searls@batnet.com)
is President of The Searls
Group, a Silicon Valley consultancy, and a co-founder of Hodskins
Simone and Searls. He has been writing on technology and other
issues for most of his life. The Flack Jacket series of
essays is collected in Reality 2.0,
http://www.batnet.com/searls/docworks.html. Other series are
Positions and Milleniana.

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